Time for another blog post about a brew. Since my
last post about the Samba Pale Ale, there was an Oktoberfestbier, a stout brewed from extract and an extremely good five corn stout, brewed from mash. Today (Feb 15th) Sven and I decided that we'd try out the new equipment and brew 50l of a SNPA (
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) clone - i.e. a nicely hopped pale ale, with a decent full bodiness and a bernstein colour.
I used a recipe from
Maische Malz und Mehr which had some fairly good reviews. I had to change it to suit 50l of wort and I also had to change the hops to suit what I had. I went with Simcoe shortly after boiling, Perle in the middle of the boiling, Citra towards the end, and then a full 100g of Cascade right at flame out.
However, things were not to come as expected. The recipe wanted almost 10kg of malt with 48l of water for the mash. This was no problem for the new Schengler 70l pot, but we suspected even then that we'd have a problem with läutern. We did. The Thermoport cannot hold anywhere near that amount. We ended up collecting the first 40l of wort in the fermentation keg so there would be room in the Thermoport for more of the mash. We eventually did manage to get the job done. Even though we thought we'd have very little room in the 70l pot if we were to use the entire Nachguss in the recipe, we did actually end up using almost a full Silvercrest full. After läutern we ended up with 67l of wort in the Schengler, at about 15 brix - also substantially higher than what the recipe requested. It was becoming obvious even before cooking hops, that we would not be hitting the SNPA recipe. It was more likely going to become an IPA with a much higher Stammwürze and (probably) higher IBU than the 37 of the SNPA.
While adding the hops, we decided to try without using hop sacks. I'm not sure this was such a great idea - I think that the hops diffuse more oil into the wort if they are not in a sack, but the result is a very cloudy wort (more than likely protein). Anyway, after cooking the hops, adding 4l of boiling water (to compensate for what disappeared in steam) and whirlpooling, we piped about 40l of wort into the 60l fermentation keg and the rest (about 18l) into a 30l fermentation keg, meaning we will more than likely have about 58l of beer. After cooling down to about 22°C, we added the yeast (Safale S05). The kegs are downstairs at about 17°C waiting for the yeast to start working.
By way of summary, it wasn't a bad brew day, but a lot of things could have went smoother. The biggest issue was overestimating what can be done with a 38 Thermoport. If we aim for 40l of beer each time instead of 50l (or 58l like what we ended up with), it would probably be significantly easier to process.
